With the release of Vorple for Glulx, now is a great time to think about what I'm calling parseless parser games: Text games that use the world model and mechanical tradition of parser games, but don't actually have a parser interface. The most prominent recent example would be Robin Johnson's Detectiveland.

This is sort of a theoretical exploration of how to build interfaces to interact with the traditional parser world model (rooms, point of view character, and of course "medium-sized dry goods" as interactive objects). Most of this involves looking at the history of graphical adventure games, which diverged pretty directly from parser interfaces and into point-and-click ones. I'm trying to produce a taxonomy of how those interfaces operate and what their pros and cons are, for people who are looking at building on Vorple to produce extensions or games that use this sort of interaction.

Emily Short recently wrote a post about what reasons there are for writing a parser game in AD 2017. In the comments, I added:

For me there’s another reason to make parser games, and specifically for using Inform 7: It’s a fantastic platform for experimental games. if I just have an idea that I want to explore or play around with, as long as it’s narrative and turn-based, I’m very likely to reach for I7 as a tool.

Using I7 cuts away 90% of the boilerplate labor associated with game development: You don’t have to think about or make UI (it’s text input), UX (it’s bad), assets (there are none). You write almost no boilerplate code; everything you write is doing work in defining mechanics, narrative, or environment. I really think more game designers should learn I7 because of its value in that role; even if the thing you make using it isn’t the final form of what you’re making. The 0 to 60 on it is just incredible compared to any other engine or game development tool.

Inform 7, if you're unfamiliar, is a system for writing parser interactive fiction that uses a purpose-built domain-specific language that somewhat resembles natural English. It's probably my favourite game development environment to work on, for a lot of reasons.

March's patreon project, Don't Mind my Apocalypse Head, was a short parser game written around a fairly disturbing dream I had. If you haven't played it, it's fairly short and I suggest you check it out before reading on.

A follow-up to last year’s The World Turned Upside Down, Not All Things Make It Across commemorates the end of 2016 with another short vignette set in the Mere Anarchy universe. Taking advantage of the threshold of the new year, choose what debris of the past you want to destroy… or keep.

I hope you all enjoy it. Happy new year, and thanks.

You can play it on the web, or download the blorb for Z-Code interpreters.

My project for this year’s Procjam, the Recombinant Armorial Roll is a procedurally-generated dynastic history of a fictional empire, assembled from a relatively small corpus and rendered in the form of a finite but very deep hypertext.

Like the Annals of the Parrigues, the Armorial Roll is a finite document. It’s by necessity more repetitive than Parrigues, with a much smaller corpus for a much bigger text — there are theoretically 65,535 dynasties in the Roll, though I can’t guarantee they all are accessible through links from the starting dynasty; I literally don’t know.

In addition to the Euphoria channel (a real-time, threaded web“chatbox” for the IF community), I also help run an IF community on Imzy.

Imzy is a link-, media-, and post-sharing website built around the idea of positive, well-regulated and kind communities. Going forward, I’m hoping to bring more activity to Imzy’s IF community and build it up as a safe and welcoming place for IF’s increasingly diverse authors and readers to come together and organize events, discuss IF, and encounter one another.

Imzy has only recently left its closed beta, too, so now everyone who wants to can read and join the community here.

Breaking my nearly yearlong hiatus of IF releases, I have an entry in this year’s ECTOCOMP. It’s called Four Sittings in a Sinking House, and you can download it from the competition website or play it online.